INSIGHTS CAPTURED

Who do you look up to? Do you compare your life to another person’s life? Do you imagine their life so different from your own? Their blessings greater than yours? Their hardships less than yours? None of us has a perfect life, nor identical lives. We are human. We struggle. We are overcome with emotion. Daily we slide between degrees of happiness and sadness. At times we may go from day to day existing, not paying attention to what we are doing. We go through the motions because that is where we are, that is how we get to the next day. We have “hope” even when we don’t feel hopeful. Are you disheartened when you discover that a person you admire is human? When their words do not match what you want to hear, do you abandon them?

In the book, A Mindful Year the author made a discovery about being human:

"Never before had I been so deeply affected by an author’s words—...

Months later, I discovered that Trungpa died at age forty-eight, allegedly from chronic alcoholism. I felt shocked and disillusioned. What did this mean for all I’d taken from his writings? As I thought about the apparent contradiction between his transcendent words and the messy life he may have lived, I had to wonder if the insights he captured were possible only because of his struggles."

Campbell-Danesh, Dr. Aria; Gillihan, Dr. Seth J. . A Mindful Year: Daily Meditations: Reduce Stress, Manage Anxiety, and Find Happiness in Everyday Life (p. 302). Blackstone Publishing. Kindle Edition.

ART: LJ Austin “Contradiction” 2024